DiData subsidiary slashes WAN traffic for Pumpkin Patch

Established in 1991 in New Zealand, Pumpkin Patch is a children’s fashion company with a presence in Australia, the UK, US, Asia, and the Middle East.

Leeann McCallum, infrastructure services manager at Pumpkin Patch's told CRN, Riverbed Steelhead was chosen to slash WAN traffic and improve application performance and staff productivity.

Currently, the company employs a centralised IT architecture, where all applications and data are hosted in New Zealand.

“This architecture unfortunately meant all users outside New Zealand were at the mercy of slow WAN application performance,” she said.

“Users often complained of terrible performance when using basic applications such as email and the corporate intranet.”

After analysis, the company realised it could retain the benefits of its existing centralised architecture and speed up application performance across the WAN by the use of WAN optimisation.

“In March, Pumpkin Patch began a three-month trial of the Steelhead appliances, during which application response time increased, with users in the UK and the US seeing increases of 56-60 percent,” said McCallum.

Together with system integrator Datacraft,(who has worked with the company for a number of years) and Riverbed, they co-ordinated both the pilot and the actual implementation, which was rolled out in June.

According to McCallum, the actual installation process was easy, with four units already installed.

“We continue to assess the business requirements for additional units,” she added.